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The land still lies - Handsworth Songs - Mark Fisher

The land still lies: Handsworth Songs and the English riots [Handsworth Songs] Handsworth Songs Mark Fisher reflects on a screening of Handsworth Songs, the

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, Oct 2, 2011

The land still lies:Handsworth Songs and the English riots

Handsworth Songs

Mark Fisher reflects on a screening of Handsworth Songs, the Black Audio Film Collective's 1986 essay on black Britain, in the wake of this summer's new wave of civil unrest

"I'm sure that a group of people who brought the British state to
its knees can organise themselves." So argued John Akomfrah, the
director of the Black Audio Film Collective's Handsworth Songs
at a screening of the film at Tate Modern last month. Made for the
Channel 4 series `Britain: The Lie of the Land', the film was released
in 1986, a year after riots in Handsworth, Birmingham and Tottenham.
Not surprisingly, given that the Tate had convened the event as a
consequence of the recent uprisings in England, the question of the
continuities and discontinuities between the 80s and now hung over the
whole evening, dominating the discussion that followed the screening.

Watched  and listened to  now, Handsworth Songs seems
eerily (un)timely. The continuities between the 80s and now impose
themselves on the contemporary viewer with a breathtaking force: just
as with the recent insurrections, the events in 1985 were triggered by
police violence; and the 1985 denunciations of the riots as senseless
acts of criminality could have been made by Tory politicians yesterday.

This is why it is important to resist the casual story that things have `progressed' in any simple linear fashion since Handsworth Songs
was made. Yes, the BAFC can now appear at Tate Modern in the wake of
new riots in England, something unthinkable in 1985; but, as Film Quarterly editor Rob White pointed out in the discussion at the Tate event, there is little chance now of Handsworth Songs
or its like appearing on Channel 4 now, still less being commissioned.
The assumption that brutal policing and racism were relics of a bygone
era was part of the reactionary narrativisation of the recent riots: yes, there were politics and racism back then, but not now, not any more

The lesson to be remembered  especially now that we are being asked
to defend abortion and oppose the death penalty again  is that
struggles are never definitively won. As the academic George Shire
pointed out in the Tate discussion, many struggles have not been lost
so much as diverted into what he called "the privatisation of
politics", as former activists become hired as `consultants'.

Handsworth Songs

Shire's remarks strikingly echoed recent comments made by Paul Gilroy.
"When you look at the layer of political leaders from our communities,"
Gilroy observed, "the generation who came of age during that time 30
years ago, many of those people have accepted the logic of
privatisation. They've privatised that movement, and they've sold their
services as consultants and managers and diversity trainers."

This points to one major discontinuity between now and 25 years ago.
In 1985, political collectivities were in the process of being
violently decomposed  this was also the year in which the Miners'
Strike ended in bitter defeat  as the neoliberal political programme
began to impose the `privatisation of the mind' which is now everywhere
taken for granted. Akomfrah's optimistic take on the current riots 
that those who rioted will come to constitute themselves as a
collective agent  suggests that we might be seeing the reversal of
this psychic privatisation.

One of many striking things about Handsworth Songs is the
serene confidence of its experimental essayism. Instead of easy
didacticism, the film offers a complex palimpsest comprising archive
material, an empathic sound design and footage shot by the Collective
during and after the riots. The Collective's practice coolly assumed
not only that `black', `avant garde' and `politics' could co-exist, but
that they must entail one another.

Such assumptions, such confidence, were all the more remarkable for
the fact that they were so hard won: the Collective's Lina Gopaul
remembered that the idea of a black avant-garde was greeted with
incomprehension when the BAFC began their work. Even the sight of young
black people carrying cameras provoked bemusement: are they real? Gopaul recalled police officers asking as the Collective filmed events in Handsworth and Broadwater Farm 25 years ago.

At a time when reactionaries once again feel able to make racist
generalisations about `black culture' in mainstream media, the
Collective's undoing of received ideas of what `black' supposedly means
remains an urgent project.

In The Ghosts of Songs: The Film Art of the Black Audio Film Collective,
the outstanding survey of the BAFC's work that he co-edited with fellow
Otolith Group member Anjalika Sagar, Kodwo Eshun argued that, for the
Collective, `black' "might be profitably understood as a dimension of
potentiality."

Handsworth Songs

At the Tate discussion, which he chaired, Eshun pointed to the use in Handsworth Songs
of Mark Stewart and the Maffia's dub-refracted cut-up version of
`Jerusalem': the track makes a bid for an account of Englishness from
which `blackness', far from being something that can be excluded,
becomes instead the only possible fulfilment of the millenarian promise
of Blake's revolutionary poem.

The use of Stewart's music also brings home the extent to which Handsworth Songs
belonged to a post-punk moment which was defined by its unsettling of
concepts of `white' and `black' culture. Trevor Mathison's astonishing
sound design certainly draws upon dub, but its voice loops and seething
electronics are equally reminiscent of the work of Test Department and
Cabaret Voltaire.

So much film and television now deploys sound as a crude bludgeon
which closes down the polyvalency of images. Whooshing sound effects
subordinate audiences to the audio equivalent of a spectacle, while the
redundant use of pop music enforces a terroristic sentimentalism. By
strong and refreshing contrast, Mathison's sound  which is
simultaneously seductive and estranging  liberates lyricism from
personalised emotion, and frees up the potentials of the audio from the
strictures of `music'. Subtract the images entirely, and Handsworth Songs can function as a gripping audio-essay.

Mathison's sound recording equipment captured one of the most
extraordinary moments in the film, an exchange between the floor
manager and the producer of the long-defunct documentary series TV Eye
in the run-up to a special edition of the programme which was about to
be filmed in front of a Tottenham audience. The exchange reveals that
it is not possible to securely delimit `merely technical' issues from
political questions. The producer's anxieties about lighting quickly
shade into concerns about the proportion of non-whites in the audience.
The matter-of-fact tone of the discussions make this sudden peek into
the reality studio all the more disturbing  and illuminating.

The screening and the discussion at the Tate were a reminder that
`mainstream media' is not a monolith but a terrain. It wasn't because
of the largesse of broadcasters that the BBC and Channel 4 became host
to popular experimentalism between the 60s and the 90s. No: this was
only possible on the basis of a struggle by forces  which were
political at the same time as they were cultural  that were content
neither to remain in the margins nor to replicate the existing form of
mainstream. Handsworth Songs is a glorious artefact of that struggle  and a call for us to resume it.

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